Valve’s Artifact is a dead game, both player and media-wise. Additionally, the Twitch category for the card game buried deep in the ground was used to throw up meme content due to the lack of interest and moderators, which in turn brought Twitch in to issue out subpoenas to Discord, Google and Weebly and anybody else to find the spicy perpetrators who filled up the Artifact Twitch channel with memes. Meanwhile, Lead Designer of Artifact, Richard Garfield, believes Valve can salvage the inert card game.
Word on Twitch hunting down the defendants named “John and Jane Does 1-100” seems to be ongoing, but I guess that’s what happens when you wage war on anonymous entities on the net. However, it sounds like “John and Jane Doe 1” has been identified according to Lawful Masses with Leonard French:
While word on “John and Jane Does 99” are currently up in the air, Richard Garfield (who also created Magic: The Gathering) believes all hope is not lost yet in saving the card game due to “underlying value” in the title’s system.
According to website eurogamer.net (archive.is), we learn that Garfield thinks the underlying game is “excellent” and “original” and gives the player something new. He also thinks Valve is a smart company with lots of “smart people working there,” which raises the possibility of the dead game coming back:
“Personally, I’m interested in designing new games or expanding old games. I don’t want to be involved in damage control and figuring out how to find an audience for this game.
I think the underlying game is excellent and original. It gives the player something new. So in that sense, since there’s something there to offer the player, I think it’s possible to save it. Since Valve is a smart company with lots of smart people working there, I think that it’s possible they can do that.”
As it stands now, Twitch is looking for the rest of the spicy skyjackers around the net and belives it found the first of the bunch, while Garfield thinks that Valve has the ability to resurrect the dead weight that is Artifact.
Lastly, Artifact is out now for PC via Steam.